Everybody with a phone and a ring light calls themselves a creator these days, but most Americans don’t buy it. According to Net Influencer‘s Dragomir Stojkov, a new study from Syracuse University’s Center for the Creator Economy found that 83.7% of U.S. adults say a sustained commitment to craft over time is what separates a true creator from someone who just posts.

What the study looked at

The report, called “Creator, Defined.,” is the center’s first long-form research study. It was unveiled on Oct. 22 at the second annual ‘CUSE Creator Con. The center itself is a joint project of Syracuse’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and its Whitman School of Management.

The researchers surveyed 989 U.S. adults who use at least one social or video platform every week, with quotas matched to Census benchmarks for age, gender, race, region and income. The survey ran Oct. 10 and 11 through Prolific. They also did 40 interviews, split evenly between creators and industry professionals.

Creators are not influencers, and not celebrities either

Two-thirds of respondents (66.7%) said there’s a difference between a creator and a social media influencer, while 20.5% saw no difference and 12.7% weren’t sure. The gap with celebrities was even wider: 87.2% said creators and celebrities are different things.

Stojkov reports that people’s own experience shaped their answers. Among non-creators, 58% drew a line between creators and influencers. That rose to 71% among hobby and casual creators and 76% among creators who are actually earning money.

According to Syracuse University Today‘s John Boccacino, the center’s launch director, Carrie Welch, called one finding especially surprising: creators can be influencers, but influencers can’t be creators. She said people saw the influencer as transactional, someone you hire for a marketing tactic, while they saw the creator as an artist you want a long-term relationship with.

Making money is fine, chasing sponsors is not

Respondents had no problem with creators getting paid. Nearly seven in ten (69.7%) said it’s fully acceptable for a creator to run their channel purely as a business built to maximize profit. But 64.7% said a creator who changes their content style specifically to land higher-paying brand deals has compromised their creative integrity.

The report puts the line between earning from the work and reshaping the work to earn. When respondents rated three descriptions of what a creator is, the “Maker,” a digital artisan valued for skill and craft, came out on top, ahead of the “Community Builder” and the “Brand,” though the gaps were modest.

Why the definition matters

The study also found that 75.5% of people see “creator” as a distinct professional role that not everyone who posts qualifies for, even as 55.8% said that for many people, calling yourself a content creator is just a way of describing a hobby.

Welch told Boccacino that authenticity came up in every interview the team did, and that the definitions carry real business weight. If being a creator is the modern version of being an entrepreneur, she said, there are laws and regulatory problems still to solve, and the infrastructure isn’t there yet. The center’s next report will look at how creators influence holiday shopping.

The takeaway

For anyone building a paid page, whether on OnlyFans, Fansly, Patreon or YouTube, this study backs up what the most successful creators already know. Audiences are fine with you making money. What they reward is consistency and craft, and what they punish is the sense that you’ve turned into an ad. Keep the work yours, and the money tends to follow.

Featured image: AI-generated illustration.